That which we call a high school diploma by any other name would smell as sweet.
At least, that is the premise behind Rep. Warren Chisum’s House Bill 131, which alters the Texas Education Code so that a student may not be considered as “a dropout or as a student who has failed to attend school,” if that non-attending students has “obtained a high school equivalency certificate (GED).”
“Anyone that has been around schools knows that’s not the real dropout rate,” Chisum says of rates including students who did not complete high school but still passed the General Educational Development test.
“It’s an equivalency,” Chisum points out. “You can do anything with a GED that you can do with a diploma.”
As it happens, not everyone agrees.
Magnum Lofstrom, formerly an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, has studied the effectiveness of GEDs in Texas and concluded that students with “GEDs do not do as well as traditional high school graduates. They don’t do as well in the labor market or in post-secondary education.”
Squabbles over what “equivalency” means in the real world aside, the truly head-scratching thing about Chisum’s bill is that, when asked if it would effectively change anything, Linda Roska, director of Texas Education Agency’s Division of Accountability Research, says, “No.”
True, students that have not graduated are left out of TEA’s measure of the graduation rate, but those with GEDs are not considered or included in TEA’s official definition of a dropout or in any measurement of the dropout rate. “They are not dropouts,” says Roska. “They have attained something, and we do want to recognize that.”
Chisum is on target about one thing, though: There are legitimate reasons for concern over Texas’ official education statistics.
“Historically, there has been a tendency to try to define away the dropout numbers,” said Maria Robledo Montecel, director of the Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA) in San Antonio, which has tracked Texas’ attrition rates with consistent methodology for 23 years and found no improvement in all that time.
“Texas is undoubtedly underreporting dropout rates,” said Lofstrom. “Essentially, you are just hiding a problem that is there.”
Just over two years ago, under pressure, the state put aside its own dubious standards and implemented the measures of the National Center for Education Statistics. The dropout rate more than doubled. The number of GED earners was nearly halved, because Texas had been counting in that statistic any “school leavers” who said they planned to get the equivalency—not those who actually had.
“There are still a number of students unaccounted for,” said Robledo Montecel, whose IDRA has been tracking attrition rates with consistent methodology for 23 years and has found no improvement in all that time.
“There is a need for a quality, reliable, verifiable, and verified data system,” she said. “We need the data and the will to solve the problem.”
Redundantly altering the Texas Education Code so that a group of students continues to be left out of the dropout statistics, as HB 131 would do, only demonstrates a will to put the data further out of reach.
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